I have been reflecting on recent conversations in the voice community about the utility of complex terms and the insistence that simplicity in the voice studio requires equal simplicity at every level of discourse surrounding the voice. First, yes, of course if you cannot explain an idea as simply as possible, you likely do not understand it as well as you think. However, I do want to bring up a thought. Technical language is not a layer put on top of what we already understand. Language itself teaches us by drawing distinctions between abstract ideas. Some concepts cannot be simplified beyond a point and retain their character…

I saw a TED talk the other day. It was something called, Where are the baby dinosaurs?   Apparently the fossil record lacked infant and juvenile examples of triceratops, t-rex, and other recognized dinosaurs. It took a paleontologist named Jack Horner to point out that his colleagues had been inaccurately naming these fossils of younger dinosaurs as new species. The desire to be known for discovering something was stronger than the idea that we should not just expect, but actively look for change over time. 

Damaging a voice limits future earning potential. Maybe the tween girl singing Puccini on television could be a trial lawyer, voice over artist, classroom teacher, preacher, politician, or any other from the long list of professions that require voice use.  Could she recover her voice with proper therapy? Probably. However...

One of my grad students was working on a project about voice conservation, and I just wanted to share this image as food for thought. These peaks are roughly equivalent to talking while a freight train speeds by about 100 ft away...

Apropos our recent discussion about whether or how younger singing teachers can get themselves in a mind set to publish rather than perish, I found this yesterday. I think it was basically a summary of what I learned in my doctorate...

Every few months, I feel conversations with my colleagues return to the same big issues in pedagogy. The question of being a "science-based" versus "not science-based" teacher came up recently regarding understanding how the diaphragm may or may not function in singing. More on that later. I understand that this is a big, loose community, and that we all come from different points of view. Still though, I wonder at what point discussing the pedagogy of the voice through the lens of recent research studies becomes the same dogma with a different name? Not studying the voice scientifically, mind you. I mean teachers discussing it in terms of the immediate practical application of current scientific research...

I was talking with a few colleagues the other day, and I’m struck by the idea that some genres of singing utilize improvisation (real time composition) and artistic personalization and others do not. Almost exclusively, classical singing is lumped into the latter by practitioners of the former. Assuming we’re talking about degrees of freedom rather than absolutes, I guess I’d like to throw two ideas out from the classical world...

...this letter and those that follow are, I think, an attempt to reclaim the idea that a big question about something dear can be sent out into the air, find another person, and sit in their mind for a bit before they respond...